It doesn’t completely avoid the problem of priors, just the problem of arbitrarily fixing a specific type of update rule on fixed priors such as in Solomonoff induction. You can’t afford this if you’re a bounded agent, and a Solomonoff inductor can only get away with it since it has not just unbounded resources but actually infinite computational power in any given time period.
A bounded agent needs needs to be able to evaluate alternative priors, update rules, and heuristics in addition to the evidence and predictions themselves, or it won’t even approximate bounded rationality. While this is a more complicated scenario than the Solomonoff updater in some senses, it is philosophically simpler since we can view it more like a “bootstrap” process and ask what sort of bootstrapping might “generally” do well rather than taking anything as fixed.
I suspect that heuristics that score highly involve “universal” but finite systems (such as Turing machines or other mathematical structures capable of representing their own rules), and a “simple and not too costly” evaluation heuristic (not just simplicity).
There would be “degenerate” distributions of universe rules that would be exceptions, so there is still a problem of describing what sort of distributions I’m thinking of as being “degenerate”, and naturally this whole sort of statement is too vague to prove any such thing even if such proofs weren’t famously difficult (and plausibly impossible to prove even if not false).
It doesn’t completely avoid the problem of priors, just the problem of arbitrarily fixing a specific type of update rule on fixed priors such as in Solomonoff induction. You can’t afford this if you’re a bounded agent, and a Solomonoff inductor can only get away with it since it has not just unbounded resources but actually infinite computational power in any given time period.
A bounded agent needs needs to be able to evaluate alternative priors, update rules, and heuristics in addition to the evidence and predictions themselves, or it won’t even approximate bounded rationality. While this is a more complicated scenario than the Solomonoff updater in some senses, it is philosophically simpler since we can view it more like a “bootstrap” process and ask what sort of bootstrapping might “generally” do well rather than taking anything as fixed.
I suspect that heuristics that score highly involve “universal” but finite systems (such as Turing machines or other mathematical structures capable of representing their own rules), and a “simple and not too costly” evaluation heuristic (not just simplicity).
There would be “degenerate” distributions of universe rules that would be exceptions, so there is still a problem of describing what sort of distributions I’m thinking of as being “degenerate”, and naturally this whole sort of statement is too vague to prove any such thing even if such proofs weren’t famously difficult (and plausibly impossible to prove even if not false).